(As in; are they still effective marketing. Obviously, the fact that they do work and that it is unpleasant work is pretty much the entire point of OP.)

I like the sight of a beautiful woman as much as the next guy. Preferrably the sight of one who is comfortable and enjoying themselves. But thats entirely beside the point.

I would not buy a tech product from a company that thought so little of me that they thought that draping sexy women over their product would convince me to buy it, and thought so little of their own product that they thought that it needed sexy women nearby to distract from its technical details (read shortcomings.)

I guess this is why I don't do trade conferrences, and why they don't market to me, but it still surprises me that this works terribly well. I mean sure; us male geeks may be conditioned early-on to be suckers for a pretty girl, and even moreso if its one who can spout a line of technical specs, but we're talking hardware here - if you're not paying more attention to the specs than the girl spouting them, you aren't a real geek.

I know nothing about your personal beliefs, but are you willing to go against them if your constituents tell you to? To pick a ludicrous example; if the web voting tells you they want to legalise baby eating, will you vote for it?

Your naive trust in the power of the human mind to overcome ignorance with nothing but evidence is rather cute.

Wrong. But cute.

The evidence of history does not support your conclusion.

Yep; all my biscuits are belong to OP. I totally misread it.

Wish I could mod you up - yep, I got it wrong.

Yeah, like I said; I have trouble with the statement; but until I get a chance to read the research, I'm giving it the benefit of the doubt. I can think of plausible mechanisms that would at least contribute to that effect, so while its difficult to believe that they would be of an appropriate magnitude, I'm not going to dismiss it out of hand.

My only real point was that the /. summary says one thing and the original article says the opposite... and then to show that again for this post, I went back and re-read the summary, discovered I'd misread it the first time, and got embarassed. So there's that.

Well yes and no. There's the water in the reservoirs themselves, that is still missing from the oceans. That doesn't account for a continuing decrease in sea levels though, except for the continuous creation of new reservoirs. But reservoirs also have an enormous evaporation rate, and the water that we take out of them for use often never makes it back to the ocean, for various reasons: we spray it on our gardens and golf courses and it evaporates, is absorbed by plants, or returns direct to groundwater. We flush it down our toilets, and it goes to sewage treatment plants where it sits in enormous pools with high evaporation rates while being treated. In California it gets run in open-topped canals through deserts down the length of the state, evaporating all the way. That sort of thing. The water isn't removed from the ecosystem, but a fair bit of it bypasses the ocean part of the cycle. Even ignoring things like Hoover dam and the Colorado - which makes a bad example because of the huge amount of its water which gets used out of the river's watershed - you generally see much smaller amounts of water flowing out the ocean ends of rivers after they're dammed (for water storage; I'd imagine the effects of flood control dams are smaller, but I couldn't personally vouch for that.)

Having said all of that, its hard to imagine that any of it adds up to a hill of beans when it comes to _ocean_ levels. I'm more-or-less trusting the quoted research on that, not having the time to chase it up myself at the moment.

I wondered this too... so I went and read the linked original article, which quite clearly states:

"Artificial reservoirs, such as the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River and the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River in China, have the opposite effect, locking up water that would otherwise flow into the seas."

So your (and my) suspicions were correct; reservoirs don't make this problem worse, as the /. summary implies, but instead partially counteract it. Bad /. summary; no biscuit.

What a strange place to ask this question... unless you're just looking for us to cooborate your already fixed opinion. Of course Slashdot thinks its a bad idea; this place is full of programmers who don't want to see their jobs outsourced. Might as well ask oil executives their opinons on solar energy and alternative fuels.

(Of course, someone will now contradict me by posting in favor of outsourcing. We're not just geeks; we're contrary Slashdot geeks...)

The study fails to take into account the number of suicides caused by not being able to drink coffee.

Exactly.

Lets see, we have a service that lets you post your life on a billboard, and one that advertises that its like that other one, only lets you keep some privacy and only shout to your friends. And it turns out that the people who were enticed by that pitch to move to the second service with more privacy... wanted more privacy. Truly a stunning turn of events.

Tune in next week where we show that people who buy sports cars on average drive faster than people who drive subcompacts...

They're going to need to be very careful on the implementation. Define "properly" peer-reviewed. Is the journal liable for libel (now there's a terrible turn of phrase) if it turns out the peer review wasn't "proper"? Can someone challenge the propriety of the peer review in court?

Don't get me wrong; sounds like a step in the right direction. I'd just hate to see it abused to discourage scientific publishing in England.

Heh; someone else got there first though - I didn't see his comment til after I'd posted...